


Through Town

by Haganeko (dainpdf)



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/M, Short Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2020-07-20 00:49:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19983301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dainpdf/pseuds/Haganeko
Summary: A short story about a woman during a particularly nice Sunday.





	Through Town

Sofia stared at the bowl of oatmeal on the table. She picked at it with her spoon, not motivated to eat beyond a vague sense of duty. It _was_ the final portion in the box, and it did seem almost… crass to delay eating the last bit like this. Still, it took her another ten minutes of contemplation to summon the will to consume the meal.

It was a contemptuously nice Sunday outside. The sun shone brightly over rooftops and pavement stones, bright and full of promise. A bird sang somewhere overhead, heedless of life and death happening all around it. A few people walked the streets, busy with their people-things and people-doings. Amid it all, Sofia moved with tremulous purpose.

All through her way, in people’s faces, in storefronts, she saw him. She longed for him, these days, more than she would ever confess. More than she would have ever imagined, when he had first entered her life. This thought was an oblong and awkward thing in her mind: she had lost herself quite a few times, wondering when, how, he had become such an obsession for her.

She arrived at the shop, a quaint little place squeezed in between a donut shop and the lair of some diviner who promised to bring success in love or contact the dead or some other such quackery, preying on the desperate and the credulous. Sofia had more than once felt tempted to visit the diviner.

Lost in the small, tightly-packed-together aisles of various papers, pens, notebooks, Sofia felt an odd sense of comfort and safety. Familiarity, perhaps, or the solace of solid ground before a large leap. Be as it may, she sighed a tiny breath and collected a piece of fancy letter paper. She didn’t really know what made it special, but she figured the price might be half of it.

The clerk was a short, balding man, his head a frail-looking egg atop a soft, rounded body. Sofia did not know what to make of him. She did not know what to make of much, these days. She left the shop feeling triumphant, though what victory she had claimed she had not a clue.

Back outside, the sun had climbed further, bathing all she could see in heat and light. Sofia hesitated; at this pace, she would be home too soon. She did not wish to, for it was not. So she settled for visiting the local library. It was not that far, and she hoped to perhaps recapture among the bookshelves that feeling of tightness she had experienced in that tiny stationery shop.

Sitting at a desk, recently-bought paper in hand, she wrote. Was it a letter to him, or to the world itself? She did not know; what mattered is that she wrote, and in doing so pressed something warm, something that was _her_ , to that piece of paper. What did the interlocutor matter when the message itself was that weighty? Much, part of her thought she knew, but she set it aside.

Time slipped from her at once ponderously slow and frighteningly fast. Soon she was once more outside, facing the afternoon with a square look and a rectangular sheet. On the way back home, the araucarias lining the road seemed to her to greet the coming dusk with prayer and thanks.

An uneasy sort of anticipation filled Sofia as she walked past a tree from which a rope swing once hung. She tried to summon memories of playing with such a toy, when younger, but none came; those times seemed as untouchable and nebulous… it reminded her of him. She clutched the letter in her hand, then relaxed her grip hurriedly, afraid of wrinkling it.

Inside the house, she found the envelope, a thick thing of dense yellow paper. She put the letter inside ceremoniously, heart hammering quickly like a caged hummingbird. She wondered idly if it would ever be read; after all, who would want to read her trivial ramblings and feelings?

Sofia fiddled with the chair; it had never been very comfortable, and it was least of all now. A sudden knock, a thick and pointed sound, startled her. She raised her head, and saw him there, at her reach. She raised a hand, to scratch an itch of some other trivial thing, but stopped herself. She looked at him, drank in his proximity, and embraced him.


End file.
